“I’d spent the night in Kalamazoo, and the day’s 366 Snaps shots documented my drive home. The weather was abysmal, and the photographs show villages in the rain.”

Noted while checking my other posted photographs taken 12/20/2012: Five years ago Flickr’s denizens were posting End of the World notes, due to the Mayan Apocalypse. Evidently it was a false alarm.

This photo was taken with my FujiFilm Finepix F10, which might be my favorite camera ever. ‘Twas small, gave me some control over exposure, and within its fairly wide limits was a reliable tool. I’ve owned much more capable cameras I liked far less.

Number of pix taken on various December 20ths: 86Year of oldest photo: 1991

Revision History:

This, folks, is the first photograph I ever took with a digital camera. It’s a bit over-exposed, but my first photos are rarely this good….

Fifteen years ago today I wandered into Best Buy to check out the digital camera selection. I took home an Olympus C-50. Can’t say how I decided to buy that specific camera, though the enormous 5 MP sensor was doubtless a consideration. So, probably, was the fact that the camera wasn’t fully automatic.

My expectations were low, but it turned out to be a pretty good camera–I took about 5000 pix with it. Like all my pocket cameras, it eventually broke; its last outing was to Lake Michigan in the spring of 2005.

Much of what I remember about the Best Buy trip is that a friend from work was also looking at cameras that day. His National Guard unit had just been notified that they’d soon be called up, and we talked about that while we shopped. Jeff expected he’d be maintaining the same sort of electronics networking equipment for the army that he’d been doing for us.

A few weeks later he was gone to the Gulf and we never saw him again. For all I know he’s still running an army computer network.

More often than not my first photograph with any camera is of Taffy. This is largely because I unbox the device in our living room, where Taf’s generally sitting in the picture window. She’s convenient, in good light, and photogenic. I frame the photo and snap a few frames.

Joan’s my next-most-common first-photo subject, for much the same reasons.

For the record: My first digital photograph was taken with a flip-phone. Photos taken with that “camera” seem not to have survived.

Number of pix taken on various December 18ths: 117Year of oldest photo: 2002

Revision History:

A bunch of G.I.s at Cam Ranh Bay, waiting for the plane that would take us home to the States. Most of us had had our tours cut short–mine by about 45 days–because the war was beginning to wind down. And because Uncle Sam likes to get folks home for the holidays. (Yes. Truly.)

Many of us would report to our next duty station in mid-January only to be told we’d be released from active duty within a week. That happened to me at Fort Dix; I was out of the army late in the month.

We boarded the plane and cheered when the wheels left the runway. But the real cheers came when we touched down in Seattle.

My Cam Ranh photos are the earliest I’m confident I can date. One (it’s of the parade ground) was taken on the 14th, four (more or less like this) were taken on the 15th, and three were shots taken through our airplane’s window of the sun rising over the Pacific on the 16th.